Per-Encounter/Per-Day Design and Gameplay Restrictions

[Mieric]

I've always used this kind of "wave" encounter design. Or at least, I started it very soon, because I was using it in 1982. It seemed a natural outgrowth of the 1st ed. AD&D model. It works great even with per-day resources, precisely because it prevents the fight/rest, fight/rest habit. And for that matter, you don't even have to do it all the time. Do it just enough that the players are worried about it, and they will hold back some firepower on every encounter, in case this one turns out to be the kickoff to a wave.

The reasons for using it in per-encounter are different, as are the explicit techniques and balancing options, but it has always made sense as a GM strategy to keep the players on their toes.

Agreed - I'm not sure where the impression that DM's haven't been using this in designing adventures came from.

As far as I can remember even several 1e modules used the "if this fight lasts longer than 1d6 rounds, the ______ from room 3b come to investigate the sounds of battle...." or "if the characters haven't already defeated the ______ from room 9c, they come to join the battle in 1d3 rounds."

Which puts the players in the position of "do we finish this fight as quickly as possible by expeding critical resources, or do we take longer and try to preserve resources?"

Edit: Often times this also limited spellcaster power by prompting them to utilize what are now considered spells of little use (if they even made it to 3e). Hold Portal, Wizard Lock, Reduce, Enlarge, Part Water, Warp Wood, etc.

 

[MerricB]

Edit: Often times this also limited spellcaster power by prompting them to utilize what are now considered spells of little use (if they even made it to 3e). Hold Portal, Wizard Lock, Reduce, Enlarge, Part Water, Warp Wood, etc.

Honestly, I don't know how much those spells were used in 1e, anyway. Hold Portal? Never, ever saw it. When your choice is Hold Portal or Sleep, there's no contest. It's one of the things that will make the siloing of spells in 4e more interesting: you actually will *have* to take a few utility spells, and they may come in more useful.

A spell like Warp Wood though, it'd come up more often. Why? Due to a lack of real killer spells at some levels. There are certain spell levels in AD&D that don't really have spells which are universally useful. So, you end up with a mix of spells, and you'll usually find something that works.

With regard to the Waves of Encounters, I think it's more that the Tactical Format allows easier representation of linked rooms rather than they weren't in use before.

Cheers!

 

[Stalker0]

When we are considering per day and per encounter resource systems, we have to remember that the npcs and monsters are changing as well.

In 3x, the assumption is 4 encounters per day. There are a few other qualities that come with that. Past a certain level, encounters tend to be extremely short (often 1 or 2 rounds). Further, pcs are encouraged to conserve resources, while npcs are encouraged to spend them as quickly as possible.

This is one problem I have with the per day system, that there is no good reason why an npc wizard should not call down heaven and earth upon the pcs. They are likely the greatest threat he has ever faced, and he's certainly not going to go down in some dungeon and face a hoard of other nasties that day. The best chance he has to save his life is to throw every nasty spell he has as quickly as possible. The only thing that prevents that is DM fiat.

It is a lot easier to swallow the fact that I can't use a manuever twice in a combat because "your a little fatigued from the exersion" then it is for an npc wizard to die not having throw all of his heinous spells "just because". With a per encounter system, everyone is on the same page, using their resources to the absolute best of their ability to beat the other guy.

Let me now return to the issue of encounter time. From my initial peek of 4e, it looks like combats are designed to last more rounds then previously. Mainly this is from the fact the average encounter will have more monsters than before. So with a per encounter resource system, there IS RESOURCE MANAGEMENT! Instead of "if" I should a resource it becomes "when". And that when can be very important if a maneuver lasts 1 round and you have 10 rounds to fight.

 

[Mieric]

Honestly, I don't know how much those spells were used in 1e, anyway. Hold Portal? Never, ever saw it. When your choice is Hold Portal or Sleep, there's no contest. It's one of the things that will make the siloing of spells in 4e more interesting: you actually will *have* to take a few utility spells, and they may come in more useful.

A spell like Warp Wood though, it'd come up more often. Why? Due to a lack of real killer spells at some levels. There are certain spell levels in AD&D that don't really have spells which are universally useful. So, you end up with a mix of spells, and you'll usually find something that works.

With regard to the Waves of Encounters, I think it's more that the Tactical Format allows easier representation of linked rooms rather than they weren't in use before.

Cheers!

Not sure about other groups - but we used them all the time. Then again our DM is a rat that would try to swarm us over and blocking the entrances via a wall of fire, wizard lock, or enlarge was often more critical than dropping a fireball on what we were fighting right then.

Then again, after reading about several campaign issues on the boards both here and on gleemax.... I'd classify our games as odd. We never encountered the 9:00 to 9:15 problem, counted ammo, tracked encumberance, and several other things that seem to be out of style nowdays.

 

[howandwhy99]

From what I've read and my experience with other per-encounter systems, I have a suspicion that most per-encounter abilities will probably wind up being focused so as to really make the focus of the game the fight right here and now.

Wyatt's blog post summed it up well with the barbarian. As it is designed, it's essentially an ability that lets you be much stronger than normal (and in terms of balance as related to other classes, operate relatively on-par) for the duration of a given encounter. There's no real tactic to it... if it's a tough fight, you rage as a free action on the beginning of your first turn, no questions asked. The only thing you're really considering when you use a rage is will I need this later today more than I do now?

And while the tactical side of trying to decide whether or not to save the rage for later is quite fun by itself, often it comes down to metagaming, pure and simple (note that I do not intend for this use of "metagaming" to be intended as an insult). When I use a rage, I'm betting that I know how my DM plans adventures well enough to know that this is one where I'll need to use it and that I won't regret that choice later. I'm wagering one use of Rage that this encounter needs it and that a subsequent encounter later that day won't.

See, this design decision comes completely from a DM-driven game style and not a Player-driven one. It limits player freedom and player choices from actually being consequential. 3rd edition play often assumed this inversion. It gave players power over the rule dictation and assumed DMs dictated PC/Player decision making. From a simulation POV, that's just backwards.

If the point is to reward players for their skillful play, then they should have control over where they go and achieve or suffer resulting combats from those decisions. If the point is for DMs to run a game world for Players/PCs to explore and be surprised by, then the rules - essentially how the world functions - must be in the DMs' hands and unknown (but learnable as the "feel" of the world) by Players/PCs.

What Players choose to do is not dictated by DMs.
How the DM functions the world as a result to these choices is not dictated by Players.

3e didn't do so well at this. The new 4e Monster talk sounds like it is attempting to solve the second issue. The first has yet to be addressed openly.

On the other hand, bringing it down to the focus of just this encounter means that on any given round, you're more likely to be making a tactical decision. "Do I spend my rage this round or should I wait until I'm closer to the BBEG?" "Should I use my Death From Above on this guy or save it for the other one?" "Is this really the best round to use my fireball?"

Removing the focus of the game from strategy and solely placing it on tactics means everything that happens out of combat is effectively meaningless to combat. I referred to this above in my previous post. Play becomes pointless outside of discrete "encounters" when it comes to challenging the players with combat.

I think that 4E, if it switches to a per-encounter system, will likely do something along these lines. Rather than having five fireballs for the day, you might only have one fireball during an encounter, so the decision of when to use it is always a tactical one. From what's been said several times in the design blogs, the designers don't want combat to become static and boring, where the wizard can just chuck fireballs from round 1 to round 5 and the fighter uses Death From Above on every goblin who crosses him. Instead, it'll be a matter of choosing when to expend a resource like that with full knowledge of your choice. You'll be able to survey the battlefield and have to assess who the best target is for what instead of being in one fight and having to guess at what's coming next. It makes things more tactical without making it into a guessing/gambling game. That "per-day" part sounds like it'll remain part of the system, but it won't be the focus.

And if this is how it'll work, it should do nicely to bring casters and non-casters onto a more-level playing field. Number of encounters in a day no longer affects one group worse than the other, so I don't need to make sure I have enough encounters to keep the casters from "going nova". I can have just the number of encounters I need to make an adventure work, and the players have fewer artificial restrictions on their decisions.

(As a disclaimer, sure the battlefield can change in ways you don't predict... high damage or an ambush might completely change what you thought the battlefield would look like, making your decision of when to use X a bad choice. But it's not something as out of your control as random encounters coming out of nowhere to bite you in the rear.)

Of course, healing, if it is still a per yay resource, will arbitrarily limit the number of combats per day regardless of your preference. Also, somewhere in the designer blogs it was mentioned that a limit would be placed on how often PCs could effectively engage in battle.

This means, the limitation on your playstyle you originally lament will almost certainly be in the game unless you houserule it. I like your OP suggestion about alternative rules for alternative playstyles. I've been suggesting a modular ruleset since I heard 4th edition was being published. You know, the same Per Encounter playstyle could be had in 3rd edition quite easily. (All per day abilities simply become per encounter ones).

Saying that either Strategy-based or Tactic-based play should be "The Core Rule Style" is futile IMO. Make both options available. I've stated my reasons for why strategy is a viable playstyle above and why it doesn't work with (most) Per Encounter rules. The idea that it should be tossed after 33 years is a bit drastic just because people's tastes are shifting, don't you think?

 

[howandwhy99]

Strategy is not exhausted by resource-management considerations. Furthermore, for a party of non-spell users in 1st ed D&D it is not affected by the sorts of resource-management considerations under discussion here, because (except for their hit points) non-spell users have only "at will" abilities.

Healing dictates Per Day choices quite well. And most HP loss is often cured by, well, cure potions. By their nature these are limited resources.

Even once we factor in spell-casting, there is no reason to think that "per-encounter" should make a difference. At present the strategic question is "How do we take out the bad guy, while having sufficient resources left to escape?" In a "per-encounter" approach, the question is "How do we take out the bad guy, without having to deal with all the mooks in the same encounter?" Different question, but no reason to think that it doesn't have the same degree of subtlety and generate an equally interesting set of gameplay options.

Your suggestion about splitting mooks from your PC enemies is a strategy decision, but hardly one that arises because of removing Per Day abilities. Too dangerous encounters remain a pre-combat challenge either way. Per Day abilities simply add back in the realism of not fighting without end. As mentioned above, if players are allowed to control their own decisions on when to fight, they could hypothetically level 1-30 in 24 hours. Perhaps this is to arbitrary a design decision to include such realism, but I'd at least include it as an option.

Agreed. So "per-encounter" has no obvious deterimental impact on strategy and tactics. It does change the flavour of gameplay compared to 1st ed, but I think 3E had already done this. The trend is just continuing.

Are you reading the same passage? Effectively, all strategy is meaningless because no one ever has to worry about anything until initiative is rolled. Neither is any combat affected by any other potential combat. "Run or we'll never have enough strength to escape this place!" Tactics-Only is the potential New Game. I'm sorry, but isn't this is a life simulation game? Life is rarely about tactics and almost always about strategy. Strategy actually requires roleplay; it requires role assumption to see the situation. Tactics that only begin after initiative is rolled are colloquially called "Hack & Slash". It's isn't bad, but play shouldn't be restricted to it.

We have a guy in our group who, in the past, has tended to be... less engaged. When he didn't feel like doing anything, he would say that he was checking to make sure nothing was coming up behind us. Nothing ever did, which was why he did it. He's not so... less engaged now, but it's become an in-joke.

Perhaps you should have had something actually come up behind you? Like a reactive dungeon or world or something...

 

[wgreen]

I'm sorry, but isn't this is a life simulation game?

No?

-Will

 

[howandwhy99]

You misread my opening post, then. I was suggesting that the call for a removal of the per-day resource system is similar to calls from older gamers for the removal of things like feats and skills because they interfere with their playstyle, because both of them introduce new areas to explore (which may not always be desired) and the restrictions they impose on gameplay aren't always wanted.

I can talk to these points as I find both Feats and Skills, as they stand now, both limiting to PCs and play.

Before I get into that though, how exactly does removing one aspect of play, per-day resources, open up new areas to explore? Perhaps the game has become too heavily dependent on magic? If Spells are the only Per-day resource we are talking about here, then the 1 spell per day M-U of old must seem worthless after 1 round of combat every day. That's so far from the truth it makes me think no one has actually played that game at 1st level. The difference was, that spell could often win an entire encounter on it's own. Or alter the strategy of needing to have an encounter, maybe any encounter. Or, as was the basic quality of magic, the spell was used in to succeed in ways without relevance to any combat whatsoever.


As to the feats and skills restriction, these both limit players' imaginations on what their characters can do. How is that possible? First, each tells them what they can do. If I say you have 5 options, then you will only choose from those 5. If I say you can do anything you can think of, then your options just became vastly more open ended.

For skills, general competency is bantered around on messageboards on occasion. This is what I believe they are trying to solve with 4e skill rules. All PCs will be basically the same in all skills and that level will be competent from the start. A few skills may be more effective based on class, but basically everyone is the same. That's reminiscent of 2nd edition Skills & Powers play.

Prior to that everyone was as competent in every skill as any other. Rogues were the exception as "Skills" were their special class ability. (I still believe the game was better off before these were added) What this "general competency" does is allow PCs to actually engage in whatever type of play they wish to Out-of-Combat. They are not restricted because of arbitrary limits on what they can learn. Or how much they can learn. Erc. In combat, of course, team work is required based on the sword/sorcery/healing synergy balance. OO-Combat everybody gets to aid eachother as they wish without restriction (other than the way the world works).

3e Feats are an embedded system of special ability increases. Instead of having special abilities advanced however and whenever gameplay and game-time dictate (based on accomplishments in the game), these "feats" are placed on an arbitrary arbitrary scale: character level. Sometimes this makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. Embedding these into class levels may allow the designers greater predictability about the relative power of PCs at certain XP points, but such balancing is and was a futile endeavor away from any particular DMs table. The 3e rules bent over backwards to keep the game balanced for every class, race, level, etc. so each could only be the same exact power at each level. They could not see power as measurable outside a 20 pt aggregate scale (the levels). This simply ignored XP points and required such an absolutely strict playstyle gold and magic items had to be given to players PCs regardless of whether their actions rewarded them with such or not. 3e was/is so very brittle for me. It breaks even when I'm following every one of its' constrictive rules.

IMO, feats are: "things you learned in game that your PC can now use to be better". Having the flexibility to reward these feats only when gameplay accomplishments dictates means the game is both more realistic and more about rewarding good play.

My dislike of arbitrary ability score advancement stems from the same argument.

 

[howandwhy99]

No?

-Will

So you're simulating... solar flares? What?

 

[Riley]

Often times this also limited spellcaster power by prompting them to utilize what are now considered spells of little use (if they even made it to 3e). Hold Portal, Wizard Lock, Reduce, Enlarge, Part Water, Warp Wood, etc.

Hold Portal? Never, ever saw it.

At mid levels (5th-6th-ish) in the Temple of Elemental Evil, my 1st ed magic-user's main contribution to combat was to do everything except deal damage. Hold Portal was particularly useful. A ranged Hold Portal behind our opponents cut off both any potential reinforcements and their route of escape. An Enlarge spell would be my contribution to damage dealing, as it doubled the damage our fighter could do - for 50 minutes per casting. Similarly, Levitate could render an enemy fighter useless, and ESP told us where the enemy was. All were far more powerful than a single casting of a magic missile, and by 5th level, sleep was just for saving us the tedium of killing the cannon fodder.

It sounds like our 1st ed games were a lot like Mieric's.

My hope is that siloing will still allow me access to lots of those cool game-changing spells in a once-per-day manner, but eliminate the need for throwing darts (in 1e), or shooting wands of shocking grasp and scorching ray and the like (in 3e) that I have do to the rest of the time.